Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface

SLAVERY AND SOCIAL DEATH

SLAVERY AND SOCIAL DEATH

A Comparative Study

WITH A NEW PREFACE

Orlando Patterson

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts and

London, England

Copyright © 1982, 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2018

First printing

Epigraph p. v reprinted from Haiku by Richard Wright by permission

of Arcade Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Patterson, Orlando, 1940–

Slavery and social death.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Slavery.    2. Slaves-Psychology.    3. Slaveholders

Psychology.    I. Title.

HT871.P37        306′.362        82-1072

ISBN 978-0-674-81082-2 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-674-91613-5 (epub)

ISBN 978-0-674-91614-2 (mobi)

ISBN 978-0-674-91612-8 (pdf)

ISBN 978-0-674-98690-9 (pbk.)        AACR2

For Anita and Tomiko

I am nobody:

A red sinking autumn sun

Took my name away

Richard Wright, Haiku

I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection,

from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Preface, 2018

THE STUDY OF SLAVERY continues to be a major preoccupation, not only of historians, but of scholars across a wide range of other disciplines as well.¹ Slavery and Social Death has played a crucial role in current multidisciplinary engagement with the subject, but such widespread interest is not new. As David Brion Davis has shown in his classic study The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, slavery has from ancient times been a moral as well as a historical problem. Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of Western civilization is the critical role of slavery at almost all the high points of its development, from ancient Greece to the rise of industrial capitalism.² From the early modern Iberian plunder of Africa and the Americas, moral and sociopolitical issues, most notably the abolitionist and civil rights movements, drove enquiry on the subject.³ Slavery and Social Death was written in full engagement with the extra-academic values of this historiography, which was all the more pressing in light of my own personal and intellectual background.

I grew up in Clarendon, a part of colonial Jamaica where the ubiquitous sugar plantations glowered like dulotic fields of memory. Slavery lingered, too, in language: as children we described the dreaded postholiday return to school and its whip-happy teachers as our free paper burn, a reference to the manumission certificate of freed slaves. I belonged to the earliest generation of Jamaican students to benefit from the decolonizing period’s inclusion of West Indian history in grade school and high school curricula. My very first original work was a study of the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 by the emancipated slaves of Jamaica twenty-seven years after abolition.⁴ By the time I reached college at the University of the West Indies, my peers and I, in what was the first generation of social science students, were fully mindful of the enormous weight of the slave plantation’s past on our troubled present. This awareness carried over to the organization of public intellectuals we eventually formed, the New World Group. It was thus a foregone conclusion that my doctoral thesis in sociology at the London School of Economics would be a study of slavery in Jamaica.

Three prior works prepared me for the research and writing of Slavery and Social Death. My first academic work, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (1967), the published version of my thesis, based on three years of work in the British and Jamaican archives, was my intensive historical fieldwork into the nature, dynamics, and particularities of slavery and the slave experience.⁵ It was among the earliest works in the modern English-speaking world to examine slavery in depth from the slaves’ point of view—exploring in fine detail their sociocultural, economic, religious, funerary, and familial life over the course of the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, as well as their psychological responses to enslavement and the modes of violent and nonviolent resistance they employed against the slave system. This was followed by my second major project, Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1655–1740, the first detailed study of a series of slave rebellions after the British capture of the island that culminated, remarkably, in the British suing for peace.⁶

The third work that prepared me for the writing of Slavery and Social Death was my third novel, Die the Long Day (1972), set in eighteenth-century Jamaica. In the absence of historical records, one way to explore the inner lives of slaves is to exercise one’s literary imagination. Through fiction I relived the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of Jamaican slaves just as Toni Morrison and other neoslavery novelists would later do with American slaves.⁷ Die the Long Day was a novel on the gendered tyranny of slavery, depicting a slave mother attempting to save her daughter from the syphilitic embrace of her slaveholder. By the time I came to write the novel, the reality of slavery in Jamaica as a double-death—the demographic nightmare of pervasive physical death reflected in the centrality of the slaves’ death rituals in their social life, and the social death of absolute tyranny, natal alienation, and parasitic degradation imposed by masters so heinous that it was normal punishment to force male slaves to eat each other’s feces—had already taken shape.⁸ The title of the novel obviously foreshadowed that of Slavery and Social Death.

THE DEVASTATING HUMAN consequences of social death for the slave are described at great length in this book. Although some critics have felt that the phrase social death is too abstract, I believe that it captures, in a real and immediate way, the nature of human suffering and brutalization that slaves experienced. But for those who are unconvinced, let me help by drawing on recent work in social psychology to spell out what it all means in human terms. The eminent psychologist Susan Fiske draws on her own and decades of research in social psychology to show that being human means having five core social motives that are essential for psychological and social functioning. The most fundamental of these is the need to belong—within relationships, to kinfolk, and to groups with whom one has strong, stable ties. So powerful is this drive that in Nazi Germany some Jews passing as Aryans felt the urge to reveal their identity, facing certain death as a result of the need to belong to the Jews.⁹ This core motive underlies the four other motives: people’s need to understand their environment, to be able to predict and make sense of what happens; their need to have some sense of control and competence over outcomes in their lives; their need to view themselves as worthy or improvable, to be able to feel good about themselves (what I refer to as a sense of self-enhancement), knowing they are lovable; and finally, the need to trust, to be able to view others as benign and to see the world as a benevolent place that facilitates group life, attachment, interdependence, and love.¹⁰

The social death of slavery was a prolonged assault on every one of these elementary human needs. Social death did not destroy them, to be sure, for to do so would be to induce insanity and possibly real death, and an insane or dead slave was a useless one. Rather, it hung like the sword of Damocles over the head of every slave who ever lived. Because a slave was human, she wanted desperately to belong to her parents, her kinfolk, and through them to her ancestors; she wanted her children to belong to her, and she wanted those ties to be secure and strong. But all ties were precarious. Her child could be taken away at any moment; so could her lover or permitted husband, her mother, her grandparents, every one of her relatives. It did not matter if this calamitous disruption happened once a week, once a month, or once a year, as the cliometricians, those sharp-eyed accountants of social death, love to calculate. The fact of its possibility was experienced as an ever-present sense of impending doom that shadowed everything, every thought, every moment of her existence. This is the essence of natal alienation, which, in addition to its crushing psychological impact for every individual slave, also entailed their inability as a group to freely integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.¹¹ As for the other fundamental human motives, the devastating impact of the condition of slavery should be so obvious as to hardly need commentary. Frederick Douglass eloquently documented the utter powerlessness of the slaves to decide their own destiny.¹² Slaves made every effort to feel good about themselves and, in their intimate relations, loved and sought to be loved. The claim, made by some commentators, that social death implied that slaves had no social relations, no community, is puzzling and indicates that such critics have simply not read my works with due care.¹³ Nonetheless, the ultimate cruelty of slavery was that these relations had no legitimacy outside of what the slaveholder permitted. In light of such fatal uncertainties all relations were precarious, provisional, and tenuous; all community verged on the chaos that could rain down at any time from the deus ex machina of the slaveholder’s economic calculations or personal whim.

The tragedy of trust under social death has been the most underestimated impact of slavery and the one that perhaps has had the longest afterlife beyond the legal abolition of the institution. No slave in her right mind could ever come to trust or truly believe in the basic human decency of the slaveholder or his community or the broader political and institutional structures that sanctioned and legitimated her enslavement. This is what Douglass vividly described as the deceptive character of slavery.¹⁴ However, the greatest tragedy of trust under slavery is that it also shattered relations among the slaves themselves. Every slave knew that, to survive emotionally and physically, she sometimes had to make choices that betrayed her relations with others. This slowly and corrosively undermined all interactions, especially those between men and women. The loss of trust is true of all people who suffer traumatic experiences under those who control the reins of power and legitimacy. As Irene Fogel Weiss observed, in her brief, deeply moving account of the effects of the Auschwitz concentration camp on her, seventy years after her liberation: I’ve never lost the feeling of how unreliable human beings are and neither am I fooled by superficial civilisation. But I realise that loss of faith in people is more devastating than loss of faith in God.¹⁵ The fracturing of trust is the aftereffect of slavery best documented by modern social science. Today black Americans are by far the least trusting group of Americans: only 17 percent of them say that other people can be trusted, compared with 45 percent of whites, a remarkable gap that remains even after class, age, and marital status are taken into account.¹⁶ To be sure, blacks trust each other far more than they trust whites (70 percent compared with 23 percent), but the degree to which they distrust their own neighbors is extraordinary. This corrosive lineament of slavery has been independently confirmed in Africa as well: a study by two economic historians shows that Africans whose ancestors were heavily raided in the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades are significantly less trusting today than other Africans, that the relation is causal, and that the impact of the slave trade and slavery is mediated through internalized cultural norms, beliefs, and values.¹⁷

We do not have to infer these devastating psychological effects of slavery from the historical evidence because there has been a profound resurgence of human trafficking, modern-day slavery, and other forms of servitude since the 1980s. The International Labor Office estimates that in 2016, 40.1 million people worldwide were victims of human trafficking.¹⁸ Women who have been trafficked into prostitution come closest to the experience of traditional slaves in their commodification and sale, repeated physical and sexual assault, and isolation. The ultimate goal in this, writes psychologist Judith Herman, is to destroy the autonomy of the victim and to induce as far as possible a state of willing submission. This may require the intentional induction of altered states of consciousness and the development of dissociated ego states in which the enslaved person is given a new name and a new identity as a whore.¹⁹ A nine-country study by a team of clinical psychologists headed by Melissa Farley found that 68 percent of sex slaves suffered symptoms of post–traumatic stress disorder. The study concluded that, existing in a state of social death, the prostitute is an outsider who is seen as having no honor or public worth. Those in prostitution, like slaves and concentration camp prisoners, may lose their identities as individuals, becoming primarily what masters, Nazis or customers want them to be.²⁰

IN THE THIRTY-SIX years since its publication, Slavery and Social Death has traveled far from its home in historical sociology. It was initially well received by sociologists and in 1983 was honored with the highest prize then awarded by the discipline.²¹ However, about that time, historical sociology took a sharp turn toward the study of total societies, focusing on the state and collective actors such as the working class, peasants, landowners, and the bourgeoisie, with the aim of uncovering general causes of society-wide outcomes such as revolutions.²² My approach in Slavery and Social Death was completely out of sync with these developments. First, my focus was on the relational and institutional levels of sociocultural structures and change. My intellectual ancestors were the early (rather than the later) Marx and, even more, Durkheim, his nephew Marcel Mauss, Weber’s historical works, especially on religion, the comparative social anthropology of George P. Murdock and his school of cross-cultural research, and, within slave studies, the classic works of comparative slavery by Herman Nieboer, Moses Finley, and David Brion Davis.²³ My strategy was to examine the internal dynamics and meanings of this special human relation of domination and its consequences for the parties involved—slaveholder, enslaved, freed, and those never enslaved—and the ways in which this relationship was generative of, and dynamically related to, the institutional process of manumission. Instead of looking at a small number of whole societies, as the macrosociologists were doing, I used the sample of world cultures developed by Murdock and a nested sample of large-scale slave societies. And instead of relying solely on interpretive techniques, I used both qualitative and statistical methods, especially the newly developed statistical technique of log-linear modeling, which is used for the analysis of categorical variables.

Second, my focus on culture was at variance with developments in historical sociology which, until recently, virtually discarded this foundational construct of the discipline. While sharing the critique of earlier cultural determinism, Slavery and Social Death, like all my other works, is predicated on the theory of the interaction of social and cultural forces as the fundamental dynamic of human action at all levels of sociation, as I have recently explained at some length.²⁴ Happily, a younger generation of historical sociologists has returned to a recognition of culture’s importance for any understanding of social life and change.

Finally, unlike most other historical sociologists, I relied on interdisciplinary theoretical and analytic strategies that drew heavily from social, cultural, and symbolic anthropology, social psychology, and the study of European classical antiquity. The techniques of the Annales School of French historical scholarship, especially that of its cofounder, Marc Bloch, were also very influential to my approach.

In good part because of this interdisciplinary orientation, the work quickly crossed over into fields beyond historical sociology: both specialist and comparative history, especially classical European studies, history of religion, genocide studies, philosophy, feminist theory, gender studies, literary and cultural studies, incarceration and prison studies, social theory, law, religion, African American studies, Caribbean studies, and various public intellectual projects. I make no attempt to summarize the use of Slavery and Social Death in all these varied fields, but I will briefly comment on a few areas of scholarship that I find of special interest.

First, and most important, the work has found a place in the study of slavery throughout the world, in ancient, medieval, and modern times. A recent collection of essays edited by John Bodel and Walter Scheidel provides a convenient summation of the work’s reception in a wide range of historical fields: the Neo-Assyrian Empire; classical Europe; Early Han China; the Ottoman Empire; colonial Latin America; small kin-based societies; and African societies that practiced child slavery.²⁵ Its reception by scholars of classical European antiquity has been especially gratifying in view of the debt I own to the late Sir Moses Finley for his encouragement and support in the research and writing of Slavery and Social Death. The classical historian Peter Hunt notes that the work has prompted historians to see slavery as a common practice throughout the world and ages, and Kyle Harper suggests that it has drawn special attention to the importance of women in the history of slavery and freedom, calling into question the assertion of some scholars that I have underplayed the role of gender in my studies of slavery.²⁶ To be sure, even while acknowledging the work’s importance, many scholars are critical of several of its main arguments. David Lewis, for example, challenges one of the book’s major claims: that the property concept of ownership does not sufficiently define slavery in comparative terms since many slaveholding societies do not have this legal principle as defined in Western law.²⁷ He argues that the legal theorist Tony Honore’s concept of property is indeed universal and applies to all slaveries. I found this a productive challenge. My response led me to a deep immersion into the concept of property and to what legal theorists have referred to as its fragmentation.²⁸ This, in turn, prompted a conference on the property concept at Dayton Law School in which the competing claims of bundle-of-sticks and essentialist theorists were debated.²⁹ Of special interest, also, is Bodel’s vigorous interrogation of the metaphor of death, an apparently final state, in light of my analysis of slavery as an institutional process often culminating in rebirth into freedom.³⁰ This prompted me to explore more deeply the symbolic dulotic trajectory that regarded death, not as final, but as potentially generative, allowing for the undying and rebirthing into the social life of manumission and eventual full freedom.³¹

Related to the work’s influence on the study of ancient slavery is its engagement with work on the development of early Christian doctrine, especially that of Pauline theology. Twenty years ago Richard Horsley challenged biblical scholars to integrate Slavery and Social Death and the works of Moses Finley into New Testament scholarship. In an influential paper, the New Testament scholar John Byron analyzed dissenting scholarly definitions of slavery relating to Paul’s treatment of the subject in the New Testament, and suggested that the sociocultural, rather than legalistic, approach to slavery advocated in Slavery and Social Death might better advance the understanding of Paul’s theological uses of the metaphors of death and slavery.³² Many New Testament scholars such as Peter Brown have now attempted to understand Paul’s theology of spiritual death and rebirth in Christ in light of his experience of Roman slavery and explicit use of metaphors taken from it. I have directly engaged with this development in my book Freedom in the Making of Western Culture and other works.³³

In the study of modern Atlantic history, Slavery and Social Death has been influential in the approach of many historians to the subject and in debates concerning the nature of the slave condition, as well as the responses of the enslaved to the varying contexts of their enslavement. However, a false dichotomy has emerged in the framing of the work’s influence: some scholars claim that authors who emphasize the trauma of slavery and its aftereffects on black life today draw on Slavery and Social Death, in contrast to those who emphasize agency, resistance, and generative responses to enslavement, withholding judgment on the effect of the institution on later black life.³⁴ A long line of superb recent scholarship on slavery belies this false binary, demonstrating how social death in all its existential constraints on the slave could coexist with agency, cultural creativity, and occasional rebellion.³⁵ One excellent recent case in point is Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity, a prize-winning account of the rebellion of a group of slaves on the slave ship Tryal, their horrifying earlier march of death through South America, and their eventual defeat and sale in Lima.³⁶ Grandin finds that social death best describes the condition of these rebellious slaves who forged different kinds of alliances and yearned for nothing more than to be returned to West Africa. Another scholar avoiding this fictitious binary, Simon Gikandi, explores the generative paradoxes of slavery in underpinning both the culture of refined, bourgeois taste and ideals of freedom and individualism among the slaveholder classes of the Atlantic, especially Britain, as well as cultural production among the slaves in the face of their unsparing social death.³⁷ On the strained, anachronistic grasping for agency by some recent historians of slavery, Stephanie Smallwood has written quite sensibly that the history that is accountable to the enslaved, cannot fulfill our yearning for romance, our desire to hear the subaltern speak, or our search for the subaltern as heroic actor whose agency triumphs over the forces of oppression. . . . What comes into view instead are the inner workings of power and violence.³⁸

Some historians claim that social death was mere slaveholder ideology that posed only a challenge or predicament for slaves against which they nobly resisted. The reader only has to peruse the first few pages of Slavery and Social Death to realize how specious this assertion is. Social death was indeed slaveholder ideology, but as I repeatedly argued both in my previous work on Jamaican slavery and in Slavery and Social Death, slaves did not internalize this ideology; rather, they saw through it.³⁹ However, as indicated above, ideologies of domination are real in their consequences, especially if the holders of that ideology had total personal power reinforced by the legal and political might of the state or broader society. Social death was not a theory I imposed upon the historical realities of slavery. It is there screaming in the facts of life under slavery for any historian who cares to look with eyes unfiltered by agentic romance: from the pre-Columbian Carib tribesmen’s command that all slaves cut their hair in the mourning fashion as they mourned their own death, to the Roman view of slaves as vocal instruments, and their legal doctrine that they had no caput (head, vital part, life), to the ruling of the North Carolina judge that the slave is doomed in his own person, and his posterity, and that the power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.⁴⁰ The slave, against whom this frightening ruling was made, would certainly not have considered enslavement a mere predicament or challenge. In the course of human history slaves did indeed culturally create in ways that changed the world, out of the existential yearning to undo their social death. Their great achievement was the invention and valorization of freedom. It was, though, a joint, dialectical construction, born out of subaltern dread and dominative necessity. The institutional process of manumission, discussed at great length in the work, was in essence the struggle of the slave with the slaveholder for the undoing, the undying, of the relationship, one which slaveholders often found in their best interest to concede. Forbearance and release, not revolution; the desire to incentivize and maximize the gains of domination and power, not any noble act of generosity, were what drove this cultural invention. While this happened wherever slavery existed, only in the West did this creation of the dominated and dominator, the degraded and the violator, paradoxically triumph as the central value of the civilization.⁴¹

Another historian, Joseph Miller, focuses more on methodological and epistemological issues in his lively, critical engagement with Slavery and Social Death, taking aim at my comparative approach, which he claims neglects subjective meaning, context, and the exquisite particularities of the past (good) in favor of generalizations and the search for truth, which is probably fleeting and significantly rhetorical (very bad).⁴² His goal is nothing less than to suspend focus on the relationship between paradigmatically dominating masters and paradigmatically dominated slaves and to abandon the very notion of slavery as an institution, in favor of problematizing slavery as strategy. This full-throttle historicism which nearly outranks Ranke is an attack not just on Slavery and Social Death but on nearly all social science, all social and economic history, and a good deal of contemporary professional historical scholarship. I have no great love for grand theories of history or society (which is partly why I parted company with other historical sociologists), being fully aware of the heterogeneity, complexity, and contingency of human life. But as the philosopher Daniel Little has well argued, such reservations are entirely consistent with the search for quasi-empirical theories of concrete social mechanisms and the discovery of modest generalizations about similar processes that recur in a variety of circumstances and historical settings.⁴³ The French classicist Paulin Ismard in his exhaustive recent analysis of the comparative method in the study of slavery has thoroughly made the case for just such a medium-range comparitivism (un comparativisme de moyenne portée) that can illuminate the singularities of specific slave societies.⁴⁴

Not only are the generalizations of comparative work consistent with the particularities of context-specific analyses, but the two approaches often complement and enhance each other. Comparative findings, for example, often uncover what is unique about a given practice and, as such, point the case-oriented historian to the significance of certain elements of the context that may have simply been taken for granted. You cannot know what is truly particular without some idea of what is general. A well-known example of this is the problematic use of the US South as the paradigmatic slave society by many American historians. It took comparative scholarship to reveal the unusual nature of slavery in the Southern United States, such as its rigid prohibition on manumission. Miller’s dismissal of institutions as static and as mere ideologies [that] are inherently deceptive, denials of change is rather dated.⁴⁵ Institutions are agents of persistence and change, both often occurring together. They result from conflicting interests and political power, and no serious modern scholar of institutions now regards them as static, functionalist outcomes frozen in time.⁴⁶ In fact, as I indicated earlier, much of the analysis in Slavery and Social Death treats slavery as a dynamic institutional process laden with contradiction.

Beyond historical studies proper, Slavery and Social Death has come to occupy a central place in Holocaust and more general genocide studies. Daniel Goldhagen was the first important student of the Jewish Holocaust to draw attention to Slavery and Social Death in his controversial and widely read study Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in which he argued that the Jews in Nazi Germany were indeed socially dead people—they were violently dominated, natally alienated and deemed incapable of bearing honor—but unlike slaves, who had utilitarian value to their slaveholders and were therefore kept physically alive, Jews were deemed by the Nazis and the German people generally not to have any labor value, in line with the eliminationist anti-Semitism of their doctrine.⁴⁷

In contrast with Goldhagen, Claudia Card, one of the leading philosophers of genocide studies and of the problem of evil, has argued that social death is utterly central to the evil of genocide, not just when a genocide is primarily cultural but even when it is homicidal on a massive scale. It is social death that enables us to distinguish the peculiar evil of genocide from the evils of other mass murders.⁴⁸ Reversing the causal direction proposed by Goldhagen, she argues that genocidal murders are often the goal of social death:

Social vitality exists through relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that create an identity that gives meaning to life. Major loss of social vitality is a loss of identity and consequently a serious loss of meaning for one’s existence. Putting social death at the center takes the focus off individual choice, individual goals, and individual careers, and body counts, and puts it on relationships that create community and set the context that gives meaning to choices and goals.⁴⁹

Thus Card finds the term cultural genocide both redundant and misleading since social death is present in all genocides and implies that some genocides do not include cultural death. Card’s work has provoked an important discussion in genocide studies in which the concept of social death figures prominently. The philosopher Mohamed Abed, for example, initially defended Card’s thesis that social death is the harm that distinguishes genocide from other forms of political violence, but later expressed reservations about it on philosophical and historical grounds.⁵⁰ Other scholars, more specifically concerned with the Jewish Holocaust, have also constructively engaged with the concept of social death, most notably Marion Kaplan in her important study of Jewish life in Nazi Germany.⁵¹

Analogous to its use in the study of genocide and evil are the uses of social death in studies of prisons and mass incarceration in America. Thus Joshua Price finds the uprooting of prisoners from kin groups, other loved ones, and their communities; their isolation and exposure to bodily and sexual violence; and their degradation akin to social death, as does Lisa Guenther, who views solitary confinement as nothing short of a living death.⁵² It was always the case, of course, that imprisonment was seen as a kind of temporary semi-slavery, but America’s current shift from a rehabilitative to an inhumanely punitive approach, resulting in globally unprecedented levels of incarceration, has led many to wonder whether a line has been crossed separating justifiable imprisonment for crimes from outright slavery, or a return to the old principle of civil death.⁵³

Slavery and Social Death has also proven valuable in literary and cultural studies, especially feminist philosophy. One of the most prominent scholars utilizing the concept is the feminist philosopher Judith Butler, most notably in her celebrated reading of Antigone, which questions the extent to which the cultural limits discussed in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic analysis of the work may be described as social death as I defined it.⁵⁴ Antigone is the iconic liminal figure, and like the socially dead slave, she is caught between life and death, her life deprived of ontological certainty and durability within a publicly constrained political sphere, symbolic of all who live on the margin, especially the sexual margin.⁵⁵ The notion of social death also figures in Butler’s other constructs, such as the ways in which the failure of recognition makes life ontologically precarious. Both applications of the concept of social death are related to the idea of livability that has become central to her more recent thought.⁵⁶ Another feminist philosopher, Carol Pateman, makes effective use of the idea of slavery as social death in her critique of contract theory, while differing from my discussion of the inseparability of bodies from their services to an employer, or slaveholder, in her discussion of the self’s relation to the body, as well as the sexualized identity of the self, explored in terms of the nature of prostitution.⁵⁷

Several students of literature have used the concept of social death in their interpretation of major texts, especially those studying African American authors and authors of the broader black Atlantic. This is part of a wider turn toward the trauma of the slave past in both the writing of fiction, especially the neoslave novel, and its interpretation.⁵⁸ Abdul JanMohamed’s deeply probing study of Richard Wright, Sara Kaplan’s reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, not only as an object of bodily violence, but as an agential body of violence, and GerShun Avilez’s interpretation of Aishah Rahman’s Unfinished Women are cases in point.⁵⁹ Several Queer theorists have also found the construct useful.⁶⁰

Two scholars from cultural studies have written among the most balanced accounts of my work, showing how Slavery and Social Death is situated in, and informed by, my other writings. The distinguished anthropologist and cultural theorist David Scott has edited a journal-length interview that comes closest to an intellectual biography. He makes clear how misleading and inaccurate are those who claim not to find a concern with agency in my work: "One way of describing Patterson’s entire oeuvre, over more than four decades now, he writes, in both fiction and nonfiction alike, is as a social-historical and moral-phenomenological exploration of the meaning of the act of refusar" (emphasis in the original). He also explicates the link between my treatment of the predicament of the heroine of Die the Long Day, Quasheba, with my later development of the concept of natal alienation: it is nearly impossible to understand the idea of slavery as a form of ‘natal alienation’ that gives rise to the systemic condition of ‘social death’ . . . without a sense of his attunement to the historical ontology of Quasheba’s predicament.⁶¹ In line with Scott, Donette Francis further corrects the inaccurate view that my work neglects the gendered aspects of slavery through a penetrating reading of Die the Long Day, a work, she observes in passing, that has been silenced by literary critics because its portrayal of Quasheba’s female agency does not quite fit their anachronistic and patronizing dictates.⁶²

Finally, there is the group of mainly humanist intellectuals who constitute a movement known as Afropessimism.⁶³ Reacting against the Pollyannaish postracial rhetoric at the turn of the century, they insist not just on the persistence of racism in America, but on the fact that race remains the critical divide in the nation, the living lineaments of slavery whose afterlife continues to define black Americans as socially dead, permanently excluded from the taken-for-granted civic culture and social life of white-defined America. Furthermore, antiblack racism, they claim, differs from other forms of ethnoracial prejudice; the fundamental racial binary is black-nonblack, and the term people of color is rejected because of its failure to recognize the persisting effects of social death for black people. So too is the prevailing diversity ideal, its celebration of differences dismissed as liberal happy talk.⁶⁴ Saidiya Hartman, a highly regarded historian in her own right, has given perhaps the most pessimistic version of this doctrine: The intimacy with death that was first experienced in the hold continues to determine black existence. The matrix of our dispossession encompasses the fungible and disposable life of the captive/slave; the uneven distribution of death and harm that produces a caesura in human populations and yields a huge pile of corpses; the accumulation, expropriated capacity, and extracted surplus constitutive of racial capitalism and modernity; and the premature death, social precarity, and incarceration that characterize the present. Our dispossession is ongoing.⁶⁵ The political theorist Anne Menzel has creatively deployed the construct of social death in her sociohistorical scrutiny of America’s racist tradition of devaluing black pregnancy and infancy through the obstetrical neglect of black women and the exclusion of black infant life from human norms. She argues that while white infant life and death was becoming a concentrated site of emotional investment over the course of the 19th century, each of Patterson’s interlocking components of social death—natal alienation, dishonor/devaluation, and gratuitous violence—introduced a political bifurcation that worked to thwart a corresponding investment in black infant life and loss. The afterlife of this is evident in the remarkably disproportionate rate of maternal mortality among black women today.⁶⁶ While most in the group have seriously engaged with Slavery and Social Death, Sara-Maria Sorentino’s observation that many others seem to circulate the idea of social death without any real understanding or familiarity with the work from which it came seems correct.⁶⁷

The invocation of social death by these public intellectuals is not something from which I recoil. To the contrary, in both my scholarly and my public intellectual work, I have long argued for the persistence of the effects of slavery in American culture and society. Typical of my position is the following statement, written some twenty years ago: "The Thirteenth Amendment abolished the individual ownership of one person by another but did not remove the culture and institutional system of slavery. Indeed . . . in many respects these were compensatorily reinforced, making life more precarious and frighteningly oppressive for Afro-Americans."⁶⁸ Jim Crow was neoslavery, pure and simple, a system of terror that partly inspired German Nazism, enforced by a police state and collectively reinforced by lynch mobs that I have shown to be collective rituals of expiatory and aversive human blood sacrifice of black victims, not by marginal white mobs, as is often misleadingly suggested, but by ordinary white citizens often led by ordained ministers of religion.⁶⁹ At the national level, however, America ceased being a neoslavery nation with the successes of the civil rights movement: blacks are now incorporated and play major roles in its mainstream culture, national political life, and military, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency being only the culmination of this top-down process of disalienation. However, at the local, personal, and institutional levels, I believe that the lineaments of the culture of slavery still haunt African-American life in important ways, especially among the disconnected young people and working poor in its ghettos, prisons, and rural poverty belts, its influence perpetuated through both white racism, institutional and personal, and the slavery-generated, self-destructive tragedy of fragile institutions and fraught gender relations, themselves reinforced by postindustrial economic evisceration.⁷⁰

Interest in the influence of slavery on the present life and cultural creations of African Americans, and Americans generally, is not confined to this circle of Afropessimists. Scholars working in film, performance art, drama, and the graphic novel have explored slavery’s lingering effects, and the extent to which, as Soyica Colbert notes, it is at best usable, at worst baggage that weighs black folks down.⁷¹ Among social scientists, important recent works have explored the persisting influence of slavery in explaining differences even at the county level within the South in voting patterns, political affiliation, racial attitudes, opposition to affirmative action, and degree of resentment.⁷²

LET ME CONCLUDE on a happier note. For any social scientist, but especially one working in historical studies, a demonstration of the predictive power of one’s findings is the holy grail of scholarship.⁷³ There can be no better confirmation of its value. Just such a confirmation of the central thesis of Slavery and Social Death was graciously handed me by the work of Anthony Barbieri-Low, a historian of the Early Han Empire (206 BCE–220 CE). When Slavery and Social Death was published in 1982 there was relatively little known about the practice and meaning of manumission in Han China. However, a year after its publication, in December 1983, Chinese archeologists excavated a vertical-pit tomb dating to roughly 186 BCE near the ancient walled city of Jingzhou in Hubei Province containing, among other items, several legal texts relating to the manumission of slaves and treatment of freed persons in the later Han period. Barbieri-Low found that my general prediction regarding the economic and military factors that facilitated high rates of manumission exactly matches the situation during the early Han Empire.⁷⁴ Furthermore, and even more gratifying, was the fact that Slavery and Social Death , ‘to give birth’ or ‘to be released or separated from a woman’s body,’ a graph whose most ancient form pictographic ally shows two hands removing a crowning baby from a woman’s body As Barbieri-Low comments: These connections clearly demonstrate, at a fundamental linguistic level, the association of manumission with death and birth."⁷⁶ In other words, Slavery and Social Death perfectly predicted the manumission practices described in a legal document buried some 2,168 years before its publication, the reasons for the increase in the practice at the time, and, what’s more, the etymology and literal meaning of the terms slavery and manumission in ancient China. To be manumitted was to be reborn into the free space of social life, from the generative, tomb-like womb of social death.

Preface

1. See Joseph C. Miller, The Bibliography of Slavery and World Slaving: Introduction to 2008 Compilation and to the Database (2018). Available at www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/bib/about.php.

2. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966). See Orlando Patterson, Sklaverei in globalhistorischer Perspektive: Von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart, in "Die Sklaverei setzen wir mit dem Tod gleich": Sklaven in globalhistorischer Perspektive, ed. Winfried Schmitz, 67–104 (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur; Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017).

3. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery, in the Annual Review of Sociology 3 (1977): 407–449.

4. Winner of the prize for the best essay based on archival research, awarded by the Jamaica History Teachers Association, in 1957.

5. Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1967).

6. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1655–1740, Social and Economic Studies 19 (1970): 289–325.

7. See Stephanie Smallwood, The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved, History of the Present 6 (2016): 117–132.

8. On funerary practices in Jamaica, see Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 195–207. On the dehumanization suffered by slaves, see Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

9. Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 209.

10. See Susan Fiske, Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004), 14–28.

11. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5.

12. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014 [1855]), 140–149.

13. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Chapter 7.

14. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 65–72, 87–96.

15. Irene Fogel Weiss, Tales from Auschwitz: Survivor Stories, Guardian, January 26, 2015, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/26/tales-from-auschwitz-survivor-stories.

The extreme case of Jewish catchers hired by the Gestapo to catch other Jews in Nazi Germany reminds one of the many plots, planned revolts, and other attempted acts of defiance by slaves betrayed by fellow slaves, as well as the use of Maroons by Jamaican slaveholders to hunt down runaway slaves. See Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 210; also Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 262–264.

16. Orlando Patterson, Liberty against the Democratic State: On the Historical and Contemporary Sources of American Distrust, in Mark E. Warren, ed., Democracy and Trust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175, 190–191. See also Sandra Susan Smith, Race and Trust, in Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 453–475.

17. See Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa, American Economic Review 101 (2011): 3321–3252.

18. International Labor Office (ILO), Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage (Geneva: ILO and Walk Free Foundation, 2017). See Orlando Patterson and Xiaolin Zhuo, Modern Trafficking, Slavery, and Other Forms of Servitude, Annual Review of Sociology 44 (July 2018).

19. Judith Lewis Herman, Introduction: Hidden in Plain Sight: Clinical Observations on Prostitution, in Melissa Farley, ed., Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress, 1–14 (New York: Routledge, 2003).

20. Ibid.; Melissa Farley et al., Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, in Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress, 33–74.

21. The Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship of the American Sociological Association, 1983. That same year the work was also cowinner of the Ralph Bunche Award for the best work on pluralism of the American Political Science Association.

22. See, for example, Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

23. See George P. Murdock, Social Structure (New York: Macmillan, 1949); Herman Niebor, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (Rotterdam: Nijhoff, 1910); Moses I. Finley, Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour? in Moses I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies (Cambridge: Heffer, 1960); Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture.

24. Orlando Patterson, Making Sense of Culture, Annual Review of Sociology 40 (July 2014): 1–30.

25. See John Bodel and Walter Scheidel, eds., On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (Maiden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).

26. Peter Hunt, Slaves or Serfs? Patterson on the Thetes and Helots of Ancient Greece, in Bodel and Scheidel, On Human Bondage, 55; Kyle Harper, Freedom, Slavery, and Female Sexual Honor in Antiquity, in Bodel and Scheidel, On Human Bondage, 111.

27. David Lewis, Orlando Patterson, Property, and Ancient Slavery: The Definitional Problem Revisited, in Bodel and Scheidel, On Human Bondage, 31–54.

28. Orlando Patterson, Revisiting Slavery, Property, and Social Death, in Bodel and Scheidel, On Human Bondage, 266–281.

29. Property and Subordination, the 2017 Porter-Wright Symposium on Law, Religion, and Ethics, held at Dayton School of Law, March 23–24, 2017.

30. John Bodel, Death and Social Death in Ancient Rome, in Bodel and Scheidel, On Human Bondage, 81–108.

31. Patterson, Revisiting Slavery, Property, and Social Death, 286–289.

32. Richard Horsley, The Slave Systems of Classical Antiquity and Their Reluctant Recognition by Modern Scholars, in Semeia 83/84 (1998); John Byron, Paul and the Background of Slavery: The Status Quaestionis in New Testament Scholarship, Currents in Biblical Research 3 (2004): 116–139.

33. Michael Joseph Brown, Paul’s Use of ΔOϒΛOΣ XPIΣTOϒ IHΣOϒ in Romans 1:1, Journal of Biblical Literature 120 (Winter 2001): 723–737; Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic, 1991), chaps. 17–19. See also Orlando Patterson, Paul, Slavery and Freedom: Personal and Socio-Historical Reflections, Semeia 83/84 (1998): 263–279.

34. For the false dichotomy, see Vincent Brown, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery, American Historical Review 114 (2009): 1231–1249. Examples of works that supposedly belong to this first camp are Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

35. An entire section of Slavery and Social Death deals with the slave as an active agent: see 199–205.

36. Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Picador, 2014), 174–175.

37. See Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

38. Stephanie Smallwood, The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 6 (Fall 2016): 128–129.

39. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 337–338.

40. Cited in Slavery and Social Death, 3–4.

41. See Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture.

42. Joseph Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), ix–xii; 1–35, 70–71.

43. Daniel Little, New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), xvi.

44. Paulin Ismard, Écrire l’histoire de l’esclavage: Entre approche globale et perspective comparatiste, in Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 72 (2017): 11, 26.

45. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, 70–72.

46. See Paul Pierson The Limits of Design: Explaining Institutional Origins and Change, Governance 13 (October 2000): 475–499. See also Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 10481, May 2004.

47. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 168–169.

48. Claudia Card, Genocide and Social Death, Hypatia 18 (2003): 63.

49. Ibid.

50. Mohamed Abed, Clarifying the Concept of Genocide, Metaphilosophy 37 (2006): 329; Abed, The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered, Social Theory and Practice 41 (2015): 351–356.

51. Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5, 9, 34–36, 150–160, 173–179, 184–200, 229.

52. See Joshua Price, Prison and Social Death (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); and Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

53. For the first, see Brady Heiner, Commentary: Social Death and the Relationship between Abolition and Reform, Social Justice 30 (2003): 98–101; for the second, see Gabriel J. Chin, The New Civil Death: Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Conviction, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 160 (2012): 1789–1833; and Loic Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the US, New Left Review 13 (2002): 41–60.

54. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 55, 73.

55. Butler makes no reference to my own detailed reading of Antigone in A Woman’s Song: The Female Force and Ideology of Freedom in Greek Tragedy and Society, in Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, chap. 7, but I’ve wondered what she would make of it.

56. See Birgit Schippers, The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler (New York: Routledge, 2014).

57. Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 64, 206, 207. However, Pateman seems to have moved toward my view on this in a later work in which she speaks of the fiction of separability, which assumes that persons powers, capacities, abilities, skills, and talents are separable from their owners’ bodies and, so alienated, can become the subject of contracts and marketed as services. See her Self-Ownership and Property in the Person: Democratization and a Tale of Two Concepts, Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (2002): 27.

58. See Danielle Christmas, Auschwitz and the Plantation: Labor and Social Death in American Holocaust and Slavery Fiction, Ph.D diss., University of Illinois-Chicago, 2005; and Soyica Diggs Colbert, Robert J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-Hussen, eds., The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), especially chap. 6: GerShun Avilez, Staging Social Death: Alienation and Embodiment in Aishah Rahman’s Unfinished Women.

59. See Abdul JanMohamed, The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Sara Kaplan, Love and Violence/Maternity and Death: Black Feminism and the Politics of Reading (Un)representability, Black Women, Gender + Families 1 (2007): 94–124; and Avilez, Staging Social Death, 107–124.

60. See Margot Gayle Backus, Judy Grahn and the Lesbian Invocational Elegy: Testimonial and Prophetic Responses to Social Death in ‘A Woman Is Talking to Death,’ Signs 18 (1993): 815–837.

61. David Scott, The Paradox of Freedom: An Interview with Orlando Patterson, Small Axe 40 (2013): 98.

62. See Donette Francis, ‘Transcendental Cosmopolitanism’: Orlando Patterson and the Novel Jamaican 1960s, Journal of Transnational American Studies 5 (2013): 1–14.

63. Most notably, Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Saidiya Hartman, The Dead Book Revisited, History of the Present 6 (2016): 208–215; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery; Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Fred Moten, Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh), South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (2013): 737–780; Calvin Warren, Black Interiority, Freedom, and the Impossibility of Living, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An interdisciplinary Journal 38 (2016): 107–121; Jared Sexton, People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery, Social Text 28 (2010): 31–56.

64. For a useful review of the movement and its relation to critical race theory see Victor Erik Ray, Antonia Randolph, Megan Underhill, and David Luke, Critical Race Theory, Afro-Pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 3 (2017): 147–158.

65. Hartman, The Dead Book Revisited, 208.

66. See Anne Menzel, The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality, Ph.D diss., University of Washington, 2014.

67. Sara-Maria Sorentino, The Sociogeny of Social Death: Blackness, Modernity, and Its Metaphors in Orlando Patterson, Rhizomes 29 (2016).

68. See Orlando Patterson, Broken Bloodlines: Gender Relations and the Crisis of Marriages and Families among Afro-Americans, in Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1998), 44 (emphasis added).

69. Orlando Patterson, Feast of Blood: Race, Religion, and Human Sacrifice in the Postbellum South, in Patterson, Rituals of Blood, 169–232.

70. See Orlando Patterson, Black Americans, in Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson, Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation (New York: Public Affairs, 2008); and Orlando Patterson with Ethan Fosse, eds., The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), chaps. 1 and 13. On what she describes as the gender dilemma for black men and women, see Shirley Hill, Black Intimacies: A Gender Perspective on Families and Relationships (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004), 18–19 and chap. 4.

71. Introduction, in Colbert, Patterson, and Levy-Hussen, eds., The Psychic Hold of Slavery, 11.

72. See Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018)

73. I use the term predictive, not in the usual sense employed in physics and attempted in economics to anticipate future outcomes, but in the manner used in evolutionary biology in which inductive models derived from known evolutionary processes and species are used to predict the existence of species unknown to the biologist, but that are later found to exist, such as the entomologist Richard Alexander’s prediction of a eusocial vertebrate later discovered in the form of the naked mole rat. See Stanton Braude, The Predictive Power of Evolutionary Biology and the Discovery of Eusociality in the Naked Mole Rat, Reports of the National Center for Science Education 17 (July/Aug. 1997): 12–15.

74. Anthony Barbieri-Low, Becoming Almost Somebody: Manumission and Its Complications in the Early Han Empire, in Bodel and Scheidel, On Human Bondage, 128.

75. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 60.

76. Barbieri-Low, "Becoming Almost Somebody, 124.

Preface to the Original Edition

THERE IS NOTHING notably peculiar about the institution of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.

Why then the commonplace that slavery is the peculiar institution? It is hard to say, but perhaps the reason lies in the tendency to eschew what seems too paradoxical. Slavery was not only ubiquitous but turns out to have thrived most in precisely those areas and periods of the world where our conventional wisdom would lead us to expect it least. It was firmly established in all the great early centers of human civilization and, far from declining, actually increased in significance with the growth of all the epochs and cultures that modern Western peoples consider watersheds in their historical development. Ancient Greece and Rome were not simply slaveholding societies; they were what Sir Moses Finley calls genuine slave societies, in that slavery was very solidly the base of their socioeconomic structures. Many European societies too were genuine slave societies during their critical periods. In Visigothic Spain, late Old English society, Merovingian France, and Viking Europe, slavery—if not always dominant—was never less than critical. The institution rose again to major significance in late medieval Spain, and in Russia from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Slaves constituted such a large proportion of the Florentine population during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that they significantly transformed the appearance of the indigenous Tuscan population. Late medieval and early Renaissance Venice and Genoa were extremely dependent on slave labor, and the Italian colonies of the Mediterranean during the late Middle Ages not only were large-scale plantation slave systems but, as Charles Verlinden has shown, were the models upon which the advanced plantation systems of the Iberian Atlantic colonies were based. These, in turn, were the testing grounds for the capitalistic slave systems of the modern Americas.

The late Eric Williams may have gone too far in his celebrated argument that the rise of capitalism itself could be largely accounted for by the enormous profits generated by the slave systems of the Americas. But no one now doubts that New World slavery was a key factor in the rise of the West European economies.

Europe, however, was hardly unique in this association of civilization and slavery. The rise of Islam was made possible by slavery, for without it the early Arab elites simply would not have been able to exploit the skilled and unskilled manpower that was essential for their survival and expansion. Even more than the Western states, the Islamic world depended on slaves for the performance of critical administrative, military, and cultural roles.

The same holds true for Africa and certain areas of the Orient. In both the pagan and Islamic regions of precolonial Africa advanced political and cultural developments were usually, though not always, associated with high levels of dependence on slavery. Medieval Ghana, Songhay, and Mali all relied heavily on slave labor. So did the city-states of the Hausas, Yorubas, and Ibibios, the kingdoms of Dahomey and Ashanti at their peak, the caliphate of Sokoto, and the sultanate of Zanzibar.

Oriental societies are unusual in world historical terms for the relatively low level of association between periods of high civilization and the growth of slavery. Even so, it is easy to underestimate the role of slavery in this part of the world. The institution existed in all oriental systems, and slaves played significant roles in the palatine service and administration. In fact, it is in the oriental state of Korea that we find one of the most extraordinary cases of economic dependence on slaves among all peoples and all periods. Large-scale slavery flourished there for over a thousand years up to the nineteenth century. For several centuries the servile population was proportionately higher than the one in the U.S. South at its peak of dependence on slavery in the nineteenth century.

In the Western world the paradox is compounded by another historical enigma. Slavery is associated not only with the development of advanced economies, but also with the emergence of several of the most profoundly cherished ideals and beliefs in the Western tradition. The idea of freedom and the concept of property were both intimately bound up with the rise of slavery, their very antithesis. The great innovators not only took slavery for granted, they insisted on its necessity to their way of life. In doing so, they were guilty not of some unfathomable lapse of logic, but rather of admirable candor. For Plato and Aristotle and the great Roman jurists were not wrong in recognizing the necessary correlation between their love of their own freedom and its denial to others. The joint rise of slavery and cultivation of freedom was no accident. It was, as we shall see, a sociohistorical necessity.

Modern Western thinkers, especially